Coverage Prediction in Urban Environments for Inter-system Mobility Simulations

Next-generation mobile networks will offer wireless coverage through heterogeneous radio accesses. The possibility of realistically simulating advanced mobility scenarios in such networks, with the users roaming across different radio technologies, depends on the availability of light models capable of predicting the users' mobility and the wireless coverage offered by the heterogeneous infrastructure. The article proposes an analysis of the criteria to identify proper wireless coverage models and shows how to use the uniform geometrical theory of diffraction and a ray-tracing approach to build up a low complexity model capable of fulfilling such criteria.